trends
We’d like to share our thoughts on the latest trends impacting our clients. In this section, we give you access to the theory behind our work on visitor participation and interactive storytelling.
Do museums’ mobile apps encourage their visitors to spend more time looking down at their phones and less time interacting with their environment and each other? My paper for the 2013 Museums and the Web conference entitled Rousing the Mobile Herd: Apps that Encourage Real Space Engagement, explores how mobile apps can encourage social engagement, tapping into the museum’s distinct potential as a social learning space.
Read more...
Here at Night Kitchen Interactive, we have been using Drupal as the primary solution on a wide variety of projects for several years now. As an open-source content management system, it provides our clients with a stable, affordable, and comprehensive platform for managing vast quantities of content. Through our knowledge of the API, it also allows us to create highly customized solutions tailored to our client’s needs.
Read more...

Voting is now closed for sessions for the upcoming AAM meeting!
Night Kitchen has proposed the session: It’s mobile, but is it working? Evaluating the effectiveness of mobile apps, together with Nancy Proctor, head of mobile strategy for the Smithsonian Institution, Loic Tallon, Director of Pocket-Proof, and Matthew Petrie, head of Fusion Research + Analytics. Matthew Fisher will lead the panel in a lively discussion on evaluating the effectiveness of mobile apps. Voting is now closed, although you can read the full proposal description here.
Read more...

Voting is now closed for sessions for the upcoming AAM meeting!
Night Kitchen has proposed the session: Best Laid Plans: Great Proposals That Go Unfunded, together with Bill Adair and Sally Yerkovich, both experienced grant reviewers, and Jill Deupi, a seasoned grant writer. Matthew Fisher will lead this fast-paced session in which a series of audience members will each present their proposal concept in 5 minutes and the panel will respond. Voting is now closed, although you can read the full proposal description here.
Read more...
At Night Kitchen Interactive, we’ve seen a huge increase in museums and cultural institutions looking to develop an online presence for mobile devices. According to a recent survey of American Association of Museums members, an overwhelming majority of institutions believe that a mobile platform is an important strategy for ongoing visitor engagement.
Read more...
Along with receiving a Silver Muse award from the Media and Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums (AAM) for Monticello’s online community (a tremendous honor in and of itself), Night Kitchen and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) were invited to share insights into the creation, function, and fruitful outcomes of Monticello.org’s social media features at the recent Technology, Interpretation, and Education online conference, sponsored by AAM and LearningTimes.
Read more...
I had the pleasure of attending last week’s THATCamp, short for The Humanities and Technology Camp, an initiative started by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. My fellow campers were a mix of academics, museum professionals, librarians, archivists, students, and other digital humanities practitioners from around the region.
Read more...
When the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) selected Night Kitchen Interactive to redesign Monticello’s website, it embraced what Night Kitchen’s president, Matthew Fisher, describes as the “enormous potential for museums to effectively realize their objectives online through a dialogic relationship with their visitors.”
Read more...
Night Kitchen’s presence at this year’s American Association of Museums conference in Los Angeles was a great success, due in large part to the dynamic panel session, Letting Go: Historical Authority in a User-generated World, led by Matthew Fisher and Bill Adair.
Read more...

At the AAM 2010 conference, Matthew Fisher will join a panel discussion on “Letting Go? Historical Authority in a User-Generated World”. During this session, panelists will explore the challenges, paradoxes, and opportunities associated with mashing up social media with conventional, authoritative museum narratives.
Read more...